3 ms·
lolz. Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by attending meetings, being knowledgeable, po
by chillfox 2y ago
lolz.
Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by attending meetings, being knowledgeable, polite and always available. Your manager's job is to inflate headcount for the executives, so their empires grow and their ranking among other executives improves.
People at the higher levels literally use words like empire and fiefdom (of x) to refer to departments instead of the departments name.
The first few years I didn't understand this, so I would suggest automations and process improvements at meetings, my manager was always unhappy with me when I did this. I was literally told once that there was value in a human doing a task when I suggested we automate something that could be done with about 5 lines of code.
Eventually I understood and improved. I would automate some tasks silently and then use the freed-up time to prepare for meetings and generally being a better team member. After starting doing this I frequently got highlighted as one of the top 3 team members.
- hooverd 2y agoWeird. I work a university and we love our self-service and process automation. Could be that it's a land-grant university and we don't have an unlimited endowment to blow.
- chillfox 2y agoWhere I was we had a self-service system as well that the university was very proud of. It's just that a lot of the things you could do on there would create a task for a human on the backend instead of having the computer just do it.
- hibikir 2y agoNote that this isn't limited to universities: Larger headcount's make promotions easier everywhere. A modern trick is to hire remote workers from abroad: I might not need 5 people, but 5 remote devs from Mexico are much more affordable than 5 US employees, and they sure mean one can justify someone in the US that is already here becoming a dev lead.